BMC Touches Clouds with Job Scheduler

Clouds are growing quickly as IT executives look to find more flexibility and cut costs by adopting cloud and software as a service (SaaS) applications. But most enterprises aren’t getting rid of all their on-premise systems, which means somebody needs to connect those cloud and on-premise systems. One of those “somebodies” is BMC Software.

You might not remember it, but BMC Software still actively supports the IBM i environment with enterprise job scheduler, called CONTROL-M. The Houston, Texas, company has supported the IBM midrange server for years, and continues to do so with the 19th version of CONTROL-M, which the company unveiled earlier this month.

The new support for cloud platform as a service (PaaS) functions — including Lambda, step functions, and batch on AWS and logic apps and functions on Azure — gives organizations the capability to orchestrate workflows on the cloud. But, importantly, it also allows customers to integrate these cloud functions with applications running in private clouds and hybrid architectures, the company says.

The company also brought new capabilities to the Control-M Automation API. Specifically, BMC allow developers to use a “jobs-as-code” approach to accelerate DevOps collaboration by building workflows in JSON, the company says.

CONTROL-M can orchestrate and execute workflows and data transfers across a variety of environments, including big data repositories like Hadoop.

CONTROL-M 19 also brings new managed file transfers capabilities, including native support for AWS S3, which is Amazon’s object storage system. This gives BMC customers, including IBM i shops, a Web-based interface for building data pipelines that connect cloud and on-premise systems.

BMC says it delivers customers a single unified view that allows them to orchestrate all their workflows, including file transfers, applications, data sources, and infrastructure with a library of plug-ins. In addition to a plug-in for the IBM i server, the company provides plug-ins for Windows, Unix, z/OS, Tandem, and OpenVMS operating systems; Db2, Oracle, Sybase, SQL Server, and Postgres databases; Redshift, Informatica, and IBM DataStage data warehouses; and big data environments like Hadoop, Hive, Spark, Impala, Sqoop, Pig, and Azure HDInsights.

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